Obama back to wearing an American flag pin

posted at 3:34 pm on April 15, 2008 by Allahpundit

I lost track of this very stupid story after the initial dust-up last October. Evidently a disabled vet handed it to him at this morning’s speech, thereby magically ridding it of the Iraq cooties that had rendered it unfit to grace the chest of the Messiah until today. Read this prescient column from the AJC a few weeks ago predicting that the pin would soon reemerge in the wake of Wright’s “chickens coming home to roost” clip entering near-permanent rotation on cable news. Conservatives naturally were blamed for making an issue of this last fall but in fact Obama’s the one who politicized it by investing the pin with such grandiose meaning that he simply had to stop wearing it in good conscience. No other prominent Democratic critic of the war that I can think of has felt the need to divest him- or herself of the sort of symbolism that those small town yokels whom Obama has such affection for seem to appreciate so much. If anything, the anti-war crowd has always been eager to reclaim the symbolism of the flag to make the point that no one has a monopoly on patriotism. Ah well; it’s all just a byproduct of false consciousness anyway.